A starter-pack for this century’s golden age of superhero cinema, Marvel actioner X-MEN (2000) was primary, in many respects, although one previous low-budget attempt to launch a franchise was made for introducing mutants in Jack Sholder’s TV movie Generation X (1996). Bryan Singer’s fantastic adventure boasts plenty of remarkable sci-fi aesthetics, with its fast cutting impressively blending staged stunts and special effects to ensure noisily convincing fights, frequently with the animalistic Wolverine (Hugh Jackson).
Impossibly agile kids, talented prodigies, and social misfits, all despised by one witch-hunting senator, that make up the secluded outsider community of Xavier’s school for gifted students in New York state, are just a front for Prof X’s super-team. These X-Men aren’t keen on fighting for Superman’s much vaunted 'truth, justice, and the American way' but they will stop terrorist plots to irradiate world leaders at a UN summit, while also trying to save mankind from self-destructive impulses - which is altogether decidedly more pragmatic and honest than those woolly principles that Krypton’s last son usually upholds.
Xavier and Magneto are old friends who cannot agree on the shape of things to come. Rogue seems doomed to victim status, Wolverine is typically quite happy to just slay his enemies, and nice guys finish first, if not always like winners against prejudice, while the young X-Men are full of doubts and fears, just like us regular folks. After this major success, the Marvel way looked like the only way for this post-millennium world.
Sequels tend to signify commercial exploitation, usually tolerated only as a necessary evil of an industry that needs to keep the reels turning. Yet the comics format - unlike novels, short stories, or plays - as source material for movies, would seem to demand a filmed trilogy, at least. Singer’s X-MEN 2 (aka: X2, 2003) introduced German, Russian and other characters, with the spectacular action playing on a broader scale, that includes Wolverine versus Deathstrike in the greatest knife-fight ever filmed.
